Good, Bad & Ugly Review: See No Evil 2

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: NA (Critics) / 90% (Audience)Directed By: Jen Soska and Sylvia SoskaWritten By: Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee DarbyStarring: Danielle Harris, Katharine Isabelle, Kaj-Erik Eriksen and Glenn JacobsStudio: WWE StudiosSynopsis:A group of friends pays a late-night visit to the city morgue to surprise Amy (Harris) on her birthday. But the surprise is on them when the one-eyed corpse of brutal psychopath Jacob Goodnight (Jacobs) unexpectedly rises from a cold sub-basement slab. Their wild party quickly turns into a terrifying slay-fest as the sadistic mass-murderer resumes his savage rampage complete with hooks, surgical knives and power saws. – (Source)

The Good:
This movie has a pretty nice cast of instantly familiar, if not well-known, actors which is a nice surprise for a film like this. Usually these types of movies are made up of pretty people who can’t act but look good naked and have strong lungs.
I also freely admit to being a total Danielle Harris fan and will go out of my way to watch any movie she is in regardless of how horrid it looks at first glance.
Also, pro wrestler Glen “Kane” Jacobs is a fittingly imposing figure as Jacob Goodnight and could really be great as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers whenever those properties get rebooted again.

The Bad:
The attempts to go deep with the reasoning behind hulking murderer Jacob Goodnight’s killing spree falls flat. And the flashbacks of his abusive religious zealot mother don’t work either. I hate when slasher horror tries to make the villain sympathetic in any way. His mom was an abusive hag…that still doesn’t make it OK for him to go around scooping out innocent people’s eyeballs.
And in what world do a bunch of 20-somethings decide to have a rager in a morgue full of a fresh batch of bodies? That behavior would have worked if they were a bunch of goofy teenagers but people who should be thinking about 401k’s shouldn’t be acting like that.
I was also disappointed with the directing by the Soska sisters. I was hoping that they’d bring more to the table than the predictable stuff I got from this movie.

The Ugly:
I like Katherine Isabelle (she was really good as Margot Verger this past season on HANNIBAL) but she looked like a total spazz running for her life from Goodnight.

It is one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I have seen on film all year.

Final Verdict:In a sequel that no one was clamoring for and that comes 8 years after the original, SEEN NO EVIL 2 delivers few thrills and even less scares as even a better than average cast for a film like this fails to make a hum-drum villain and pedestrian directing work.